RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-helprin-asks-are-americans-ready-for-war-novelist-scholar-0214b82b?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Free nations prefer peace to war, but that preference is complicated by the continued existence of nations led by criminals, ideologues and irredentists. In a fallen world, war eventually comes, wanted or not.

And it’s coming. Iran and its proxies, having started one war in Israel, don’t appear reluctant to consider another with the U.S. A Russian victory in Ukraine, even a partial one, would make eventual confrontation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization almost inevitable. China menaces Taiwan. And the possibility that Kim Jong Un isn’t plotting an attack on South Korea—or on the U.S.—is a bet only a fool would take.

These admittedly rather basic reflections occurred to me as I read Mark Helprin’s latest novel, “The Oceans and the Stars.” The book, which went on sale on Oct. 3, relates fictional circumstances that became far easier to credit four days later. Mr. Helprin’s novel imagines a war launched by Iran against the U.S. and Israel, a political class that views national security exclusively as a means of gaining electoral advantage, a perpetually irritable American president whose chief goal is to avoid blame, and an army of terrorists capable of savagery so repellent that Western elites refuse to contemplate it.

There are other anticipatory details. Mr. Helprin’s story, written between 2019 and 2022, somehow counters the American news media’s outrage over Israel’s inadvertent targeting of World Central Kitchen aid workers in April of this year. The novel’s hero, a U.S. Navy captain, observes that compared with Israel, “we’ve killed vastly many more of our own in friendly fire, thousands actually, yet we find it hard to accept that someone else can do it.”

Last month I visited Mr. Helprin’s home here, some 10 miles north of Charlottesville. On the wall of his vast and spacious library I spy a framed August 1941 photograph of Winston Churchill on the deck of the H.M.S. Prince of Wales, the ship on which the prime minister met FDR to enlist the U.S. in the struggle against fascism. I came to Earlysville—I say this at the risk of melodrama—to ask Mr. Helprin the sort of question that Churchill had contemplated in the years before that photograph was taken: Are we ready to fight?

The answer today is plainly no. But neither were the British in 1935. What does America need to do to get ready?

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Many problems we face make the front pages, and deservedly so: seven and a half million illegals through our southern border over the past three years; A Messianic belief that man alone is responsible for climate change; pro-Palestine and anti-Semites protesting on college campuses for misogynistic Hamas; rising crime; an aggressive China and revisionist Russia; a domestic education system that focuses on identity politics rather than fundamentals of learning; a belief that equal outcomes should replace equality of opportunities; and that energy inflation can be cured by controlling prices and limiting supplies. With that, debt and deficits are relegated to the back pages.

Yet too much debt moves the hands of the doomsday clock closer to midnight. However, when entered into judiciously, debt can be a good thing. Mortgages, auto loans, and the purchase of appliances on time have allowed consumers to live lifestyles unavailable to their forebearers. Student loans, when not overwhelming, lead to improved earnings. We should, however, live within our means. As for the state – a nation must be able to keep secure its people and its principles. As well, it must be able to fund infrastructure projects and other necessary expenses. Because the state has the ability to print its currency, living with a balanced budget, while preferable, is not necessary.

However, when too much leverage is employed – examples being NYSE margin requirements of 10% in the 1920s and reduced/no-down-payments on housing in the 2000s – debt leads to a collapse in pricing and a loss in values. When incomes fail to keep pace with debt accumulation, risks of bankruptcies rise, as happened in 2023 when bankruptcies reached a 13-year high. And when a nation’s spending causes it to raise taxes to a level that inhibits, or limits, economic growth, everyone suffers.

Over the past several years, we have become addicted to low interest rates, which encourage borrowing and discourage savings. After years of near-zero Fed Fund rates, following the 2008 credit crisis and despite 23 subsequent quarters of positive GDP growth, the Fed only began to raise rates in the 4th quarter of 2015. With the advent of Covid in the first quarter of 2020, the Fed again lowered the rate to near zero, which is where it remained for two years, until the second quarter of 2022, despite strong GDP growth in 2021. When inflation became a problem the Fed raised its benchmark rate. Now, despite inflation still running ahead of the Fed’s target, many are urging the Federal Reserve to lower rates before year end. And perhaps they will. Politically it is tempting, especially in an election year. However, consequences of years of exceptionally low interest rates include government bloat, an increase in debt, a rise in asset prices, and inflation – an unsustainable burden on our children and grandchildren, a burden they will have to bear.

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-tyranny-of-the-uniparty/

Editor’s Note: The first step in winning a war is to recognize the fact that you are in one. This means, first and foremost, to come to know your enemy and his goals. In a recent essay for this site, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards of the Claremont Institute make a compelling case that the present enemy—the “woke” or group quota regime—is a totalitarian threat, and that its aims are nothing short of revolutionary. While our own troubles may seem far removed from the hard totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Ellmers and Richards argue that the six traditionally accepted elements of totalitarianism are already present in woke America. What’s more, they identify three factors that are unique to the tyranny of the present day.

In the following essay, Josh Hammer defends and expands on one of the Ellmers’ and Richards’ most challenging assertions: that ours is, in effect, a single-party regime. As the late Claremont scholar Angelo Codevilla first argued more than a decade ago, the institutional Republican Party has become a sham opposition, complicit in—often even willingly advancing—the agenda of the woke regime. This is the second in a series of nine contributions by leading experts on the nine defining elements of what Ellmers and Richards dub “Totalitarianism, American Style.”

Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards have convincingly demonstrated the tyrannical nature of the woke-addled regime now presiding over American life. Their identified trifecta of factors that together evince a distinct 21st-century totalitarianism—a global elite, the modern administrative state, and a concomitant rejection of objective truth and the most rudimentary of Western principles—is both compelling and, unfortunately, highly apropos to our current morass.

The rise of an insidious American ruling class, far removed from the interests and desires of most Americans and hardly still accountable to them, is not a recent development. The late, great Angelo Codevilla documented its emergence 14 years ago now, in his definitive essay on the subject. I have also written about the modern American ruling class no shortage of times—both within and beyond the ambit of the Claremont Institute, where Codevilla was a senior fellow and where Tom Klingenstein serves as chairman. That American society has a deeply embedded ruling class is now well accepted by most of Red America, and it is not uncommon to hear Republican candidates and elected officials denounce its prevalence and malevolence.